


Skirt Full of Thorns

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Deathly Hallows compliant, F/F, Minor Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-16 14:24:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8105836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: This is a story about Ginevra Molly Weasley.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the 2016 HP femmefest at LJ, and the original version of the story is posted [here](http://femmefest.livejournal.com/102178.html), in two parts; the insanely talented fire_juggler also recorded a podfic of that version, which you can find [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8084920)!!! This is the very recently revised version of the very same story. <3

She wasn’t going to do it, not with Luna there—it’s the weekend before she’s supposed to embark on some frigid expedition to Antarctica armed with a research grant and a few very fine threads of hope—but Harry isn’t home until six, and she’d left James and Albus with her mother in Devon for the day, and they’re both already eyeing the half-empty bottle of Ogden’s Old on top of the fridge with such an ardent longing that Ginny decides there is no time like the present to divine the uncertain state of her traitorous fucking uterus. She watches Luna pour herself a drink and then excuses herself to the bathroom where she spends the next three minutes perched on the edge of the bathtub, waiting for the plastic Muggle magic to manifest in the twin blue lines she knows she’ll find when she turns the test face-up on the toilet, having already spent the last few insomniac nights sitting on the back steps, two weeks late for blood and pain and voracious with some gnawing hollow want in her gut that no amount of food or fucking or exertion will touch. Outside the door Luna is talking about mermaids while Ginny counts to sixty, staring at the toilet lid, another hour spreading out before her that she doesn’t know how to fill.

“Anyway she told me she told me she’d eat livers first but she always left the eyes for the crows because it all seemed very ritualistic and profound, but really just because she liked to watch the birds peck them out. She thought it was great philanthropy to give back to the environment,” says Luna, fingers tapping against the back of the door like a clumsy typist so that Ginny has to orchestrate her counting to the tune of it, one-two-three, one-two-three four. “She’d read a lot of Anne Sexton and everything Susan Sontag ever wrote apparently. Her lips were very red. She reminded me of you.”

“I’ve never read Anne Sexton and liver tastes like shit. I don’t think we’ve got much in common,” says Ginny, and flips the test over to find the powder-blue line clamoring for attention, right where it was when her sons were still tadpoles in her womb. No more Quidditch, she’ll have to tell her parents and Harry and Ron and Hermione and she’ll have to start shoveling down broccoli stems again. Briefly she is struck with the sensation that she’s stepped out of her own body, which happens often when she looks too hard at the disassembled bones of her life: here is the bathtub with its children’s shampoos—magical de-tangling for James, here is her de-frizzing conditioner that doesn’t work, here is Albus’s toy squid lying by the drain and Harry’s razor at the sink and the lipstick that was a gift from Fleur, which she thinks dutifully about wearing sometimes but never does. Dollhouse props. When she sits very still and looks at herself just right in the mirror she thinks she could turn into a plastic thing too, that maybe she should want to, though she usually just chalks it up to the static-numb disconnect she feels between her mind and her body sometimes. What should be versus what is versus the mythological undigested ideal festering with the shame and the rancor and the fear and the choking, monstrous thing stretched piecemeal between her throat and her heart and her groin. 

“You’ve never tried human liver either so I think it’s odd to make a distinction just because you’ve never read any Sexton,” Luna says. “It was the general aura, not an absolute likeness. But you’ve both got very sharp teeth.”

Ginny snorts and considers asking what kind of aura she has just for a laugh—when she was fourteen, Zacharias Smith tried to get his hand up her skirt during divination tutoring while he told her the tealeaves said she was like a downpour for his parched soul, and also his hands hurt from Quidditch practice and her thighs were just so warm so couldn’t she just—but decides she’d rather not know. A swallowing black-hole nothing, cold deep-sea blanks; she’d be a funeral shroud, the broken chain at the bottom of a teacup, dots of Pointillist light that congeal into a fractured smear of nothing, a story in a language she can’t speak.

“Did you fuck her,” Ginny asks instead, and starts counting the spaces between breaths again just for the distraction.

“Oh, no. Of course not,” Luna laughs, “I haven’t got a death wish. And I’m not exactly sure how mermaid sex works either, what with the fish tails and all. I was just there to talk to her.”

“I’ve always wondered about that. If you’re going to be like, taking your life into your hands willingly every few weeks you could just ask her, I’m sure she’d tell you next time. They appreciate weird.”

“It isn’t taking my life into my hands, one, and two, that’s anti-merfolk rhetoric to the bone, and three, we’ve both always been weird so that point’s completely moot.”

“Ah, shit,” says Ginny, “shit, I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“Really walking around Manchester is more dangerous, or tracking erumpents, or brewing anti-fertility potions for yourself. And it’s not as if they haven’t been forced out of Wizard and Muggle societies and made to live with nothing for virtually always, like, when all they get from our kind is hurt and rape and misery and lives with no prospects at all, is it any wonder,” says Luna. “But if you want to get psychological about it all I suppose it comes from growing up with no one , we were out there all on our own—I don’t think I spoke to anyone my own age for a good six years, not until I got to Hogwarts.”

“So now you talk to everyone.”

“People and non-people have loads to say even when you can’t understand a word,” says Luna, with a bright peal of warmth that tells Ginny she’s smiling. “We’re all screaming it under our breath, and you know everyone seems normal until you know them, so I think it’s best to soak up everything you can and then give it back. Like you’ve been given a But the mermaid, you know—she’s stranded there on that reservoir after the potions group forced them to relocate and there’s never enough of anything. She was _bursting_. She’ll probably die there.”

“Oh,” says Ginny.

A dead-white haze seems, for a moment, to expand behind her eyes when she closes them, and suddenly Ginny wants to leave—not to hurt her children or Harry or her brothers and her parents, but to be free, unaccountable, blameless. Maybe it’s just the heat, or Dorset in the spring, green and reveling in its own primal quavering abundance until it makes her nauseous, chafing at the mid-May sunlight and the birth-soft skin of the red earth. She was happier in London, cradled there in the palm of the fractured, ancient city with its dividedness and its incalculable strength thrumming through the brick and mortar and asphalt, where there was history and promise and reverberations spreading centrifugal beneath her feet. They should move back to London.

Through the fog she can hear Luna speaking, like a bell in the night, but the world feels stunted suddenly, as if she’s trapped on the other side of the world watching everything happen very far away from everyone else, beleaguered, thinking of Luna on the other side of the door, feeling afflicted and blessed at once. In the mirror she truly does look like a seventh child, her mother’s only daughter, gritting her sharp teeth like a woman to remain unbowed under the weight of such enormous work and the life beginning to swell inside her. She is twenty-six. She feels like a child.

“I mean she was _red_ , is what I was trying to say,” Luna is saying, her voice like the dissipation of a dream. It’s too hot for May, and Ginny can feel sweat sliding down the back of her neck and beading at her hairline; how much life it takes to make life, she thinks, to nurse the mealy seed inside of you until it turns to fruit, to try to be a woman with all a woman’s fury at the wide open world and the impossibility of fitting into its empty spaces where the wild blaring nothing demands always filling and feeding and thankless cultivation. She wants a drink; she can’t have a drink; she leans over the sink and hates. “Sometimes,” Luna is still saying, “you’re very red, too.”

“Luna I don’t know what the hell that means, but if you want to get into the particulars, I think I’m closer to green.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m pregnant.” Unsaid: I am terrified. Also: sometimes I feel like I am impersonating someone else and it makes me wonder if this is what it’s like to spend the rest of your life going insane. And still: I cannot stop thinking about you on the other side of this door, your hands, your mouth. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

Luna opens the door, her eyes wide and her soft bright mouth fixed in an O the way it was when she was sixteen and Ginny thought, perversely, about what it would be like to kiss her or bite her bottom lip when it was just them, alone behind the broom shed or at the throat of the Forbidden Forest. She could do it now if she wanted, propelled by pain or fear or the sickly tearing desire that thrills and shames her by turns when she will let herself feel it at all. Again she has the sense of being outside of herself in her own house, muzzy out-of-body nostalgia, a woman watching a woman in a bathroom, dreaming of kissing her best friend.

“That explains a lot,” says Luna.

“Such as?”

“Why you looked like you were ready to combust at the table,” says Luna, and grins with all her teeth in that whiplash way of hers, like a boggart suddenly changing shapes. “Congratulations—oh, you have to give it a good name. Name it something purple. Something with bells in it.”

“I’d like it not to hate me,” she says. Her own mother named her for the distant, wild-looking progenitor of the Prewetts who grew her tangled red hair down to her waist and made meatballs on Sundays. They kept her portrait in the attic like their very own tempera Bertha Mason because her father didn’t like the way she snapped at him for fiddling with cars and wall clocks while her mother washed his shirts and cooked for nine and was the last to bed every night, spending her time looking aggrieved in a corner where she could occasionally be heard arguing with the resident ghoul. “Maybe something that won’t inspire other kids to write obnoxious limericks.”

“That’s no fun,” says Luna, setting her whiskey on the counter beside the glittery blue toothpaste, helpfully labeled for Choosy Moms Like You! She leans against the vanity where Ginny’s eyes catch on the runs in her blue stockings and the overabundance of bracelets on her wrists, which combined with the Stereolab t-shirt and the Poly Styrene-esque bow in her wild hair make her look like a holy ghost assembled from the flotsam of the decades, a thrift-store amalgamation of all the different women she’s been. “I just think, you shouldn’t weigh kids down with their grandparents’ names, or giving them great-aunt Sophie’s maiden name just out of some misplaced sense of duty. No offense.”

“Good one, Luna.”

“I’m just we shouldn’t keep paying for our parents’ mistakes and they shouldn’t keep paying for ours. Give them something new,” says Luna. “You’re so lucky. You’re starting three whole people, you know—here,” she says, and pulls Ginny to her in a hug, arms around her waist, her laughing mouth touching the corner of Ginny’s jaw in something that isn’t a kiss as much as a dry graze of lips against her skin, but it’s still enough to flood her clean through with such yearning so swiftly that she almost wants to cry.

It’s different from being held by Harry. She can feel Luna’s heart beating against her own in muffled percussive asymmetry, her breasts pressed against Ginny’s, the smell of jasmine and the soap and the faint, comical whiff of garlic that might lead you to think she’d been cooking but is really just the cloves she keeps in her pocket in case of wayward vampires in broad daylight in the den of iniquity that is her sunlit home in Manchester. Here are the depths of Luna Lovegood, here are the bright threads of her being, ridiculous and beautiful, somehow containable in Ginny’s arms as her own is, she thinks, in Luna’s. It seems somehow unreal, obscene, and she pulls away breathless and slightly woozy.

Failure, for some reason, hisses inside her like a lit match. She has failed something—her children, Harry, the cluttered house, the delicate thing she must coax to life in her womb, her mother and her mother’s mother all the way down the umbilical chain to Ginevra Prewett I raging in the attic of the Burrow. Cut me open, she thinks, cut me open and you’d see every ache ever heaped onto the collective backs of every woman who wasn’t woman enough: shame in the large intestine, disappointment stacked along the rib-rungs, every yearning and every failure in the stomach lining, inadequacy behind the eyes and in the ungentle womb, unmet expectation and regret in her breasts. All the bad dreams in the glass-shard gasp late at night. Fear, rage, loss, pain, bitter black nightshade agony and agony and agony: choked in the throat, lodged in symbolic fucking fatality in the esophagus, the fruit she cannot swallow. It’s the grandest fucking bullshit ever devised, the longest-running lie dropped onto women’s tongues and in their ears and their bellies and thighs and too-large pores like venom, like knowing you will never be enough. She shouldn’t care but she does, she _does_ , and she hates how royally she can’t stop; something, probably, is wrong with her.

“God, I wish I could have a fucking drink, like, just a thimbleful of something,” she says, looking away from Luna and then back again, not quite guiltily. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it, it’s just my nerves feel like they’ve been electrocuted. Or it’s the hormones I guess,” she adds, but then they’ll always tell you it’s the hormones so who can tell the difference anyway.

“I think you worry altogether too much about how you sound,” says Luna, “and it’s not the hormones because I’ve know you since we were eleven and that’s what you say every time something momentous happens and everything feels too heavy.”

“They should name sneakoscopes after you,” says Ginny. “I’m sorry but do you mind if we get out of here? It’s hot and if I’m going to be drinking soda water and apple juice for the next nine months I need to acclimate myself.”

“I’ll drink twice as much for you to make up the difference.”

“That’s sweet of you.” Ginny pushes past her and back into the kitchen, where she supposes she should look for something to water the tiny seed inside her. The sense of possession again, she thinks, the sentient presence of another thing with her always, breathing with her lungs. Vaguely she wonders what she’ll call her craving this time; tomatoes, she wishes, or pomegranates, something ancient, something bloody.

“This is momentous,” Luna says, again, once they’re on the couch and she’s on her second whiskey while Ginny drinks apple juice out of the carton and itches somewhere deep in her chest. On her old turntable she’s switched the gauzy hush of _Exile in Guyville_ for _Dig Me Out_ but she can’t stop her nerves and her mouth from snagging against the drums and the voices, _I’m the water I’m the dishes I’m the soap_ , washing everything out of her throat when she tries to think of something to say. 

“Fucking meteoric,” Ginny agrees, after a beat. “I’m, Luna, I’m so glad you were here with me, that it was you first, I mean. Thanks for—for being there.”

“You sound like a greeting card right now. Tell me what a treasure I am and how growing beside me has been like watching a rose come into full blossom at the first of spring.”

“Asshole. More like you’re the north star of pot and fucking weird trail cam footage. And bad palmistry, but I remember you made a killing on that.”

“I haven’t done that since sixth year when Professor Trelawney finally caught on but you wouldn’t _believe_ what people paid to pass their OWLs. And there was all the illegal Apparating to Aberdeen but that was more of a joint effort.”

“That spot we set up by the old pumpkin patch—where the fence used to be—it’s still there. I checked when McGonagall asked me to tea last summer and I got nostalgic for all the times we fell on our asses drunk,” says Ginny. “Sometimes I wonder if any other girls have found it.” She hopes they have, girls like her, like all girls, reading _Enchantress_ and falling in love with Quidditch players and getting razor burn on their shins and trying to tell their own fortunes, Apparating to the rest of the blazing world to see The Breeders or sneak into pubs or cinemas and buy pakora and see a Yayoi Kusama exhibition, wandering along the electric jangle of the unsleeping night, making each other laugh, Luna’s hair like spilled watercolor against the streetlights, the smell of their cold winter skin and jasmine and the thrum of her own heart drowning out the quieter voices, whispering _what if, what if, what if_. Across the couch she watches the bob of Luna’s throat when she swallows the last of the whiskey Ginny can’t have and then stares outside into the weak heat-hazy Dorset sky until the sun leaves a burnt-out spot smoldering behind her eyes.

She tells Harry while they’re both leaning against the stove waiting for the water to boil for spaghetti carbonara at dinner, which isn’t how she planned to tell him because she hadn’t planned it out at all, which feels like another infinitesimal failure in her plastic dollhouse life, a crack in the cardboard roof or a broken leg on a thimble-sized chair, but he takes it the way he takes all the joys she has ever tried to create for him: he lets out a shocked breath and then there’s that slow sweeping brilliance dissolving across his face, unguarded, too good and too kind and too earnest and too wonderful not to love. It amazes her still that he wanted her. After they tell James and Albus at the dinner table and Harry kisses her over the washing-up, she thinks with a spark of after-dinner déjà vu that she’s gotten the knack of this: she can live as herself, she is whole, she is not a marionette jerking around with doll limbs and doll eyes and a swirling vortex of a mind that never stops churning inside the plaster walls of her dollhouse. It’s like learning to ride a broom or a bicycle, the scorched clarity that comes from tipping yourself into balance. She’ll take a job writing a column in the _Prophet_ for a while or maybe apply at _Seeker Monthly_ again. She’ll put on the lipstick Fleur gave her. She’ll visit her mother and her belly and her breasts will swell and she’ll fold away her fear and her rancor and wrap her arms around her baby when it comes, as if she could do anything else.

Harry touches her waist while she’s brushing her hair before bed, timorous even now, how long has it been, and she lets him pull her clothes off and press her onto the blue duvet, bending her knees, reaching for him with arms and eyes as he pushes inside her with a slow, practiced shift of hips. This is when she starts to drift. She clutches at his shoulders appropriately, moves her hips, arches her back underneath him, wants and wants abstractly like she’s learned to in sweet balletic routine; in the middle of it she thinks of Luna’s lips and her hair brushing against her jaw, her mouth surprised and budlike in a round wet O, and she feels a high golden chord shiver in her belly as Harry finishes quietly with a choked-off groan, almost polite; she’s not there herself by the time he pulls out, not even in the same galaxy, and she knows she won’t be—that she never has been, and it terrifies and infuriates and it stings and stings. Harry rolls over after a moment and puts a hand on her thigh but Ginny sits up instead, supposing she’s failed this part of the balancing act too, but she hasn’t faked an orgasm for any man in her life, a strict personal philosophy born of a sixteen-year-old’s fumbling fury and the bloodspots like bruised fruit or crushed petals lining the insides of her thighs, sharpened to a needle-fine dagger point after reading some Important Magi-Biological Research for her witch studies project in seventh year which concluded that men’s arousal and subsequent climax had deep, vital biological roots but in women it was just a funny fluke, another female anatomical curiosity to be flayed open in an ongoing autopsy of manufactured inferiority. If whole teams of enlightened male scientists wouldn’t bother, neither would she. Not for love, not for fucked-out exhaustion, not for glass-heeled egos; messy mediocrity needs no reward, pleasure taken as from a machine deserves no further regard. We match them toil for toil and so much more, we must be twice as good for half as much, she’d said drunkenly to Alicia Spinnet, and they can’t even do this much.

It’s what she’s thinking of, a bit angrily—the hormone fluctuation, everyone is going to say, that’s why you feel this way, take up scrapbooking or something—when she slips off the bed to the bathroom, kissing Harry at his temple where the hair sticks sweetly with sweat one more time before she goes and then shutting the door so she can shove two fingers inside herself, head tipped back against the white wall, biting through inside of her cheek and tasting the sour iron-rush blood. When she holds her breath there are a thousand voices teeming inside her, inside this house, in the copy of _Enchantress_ on the edge of the bathtub (No Other Woman Has Tried This on Him! Flatten your Belly! Decode His Muggle Text Messages! Little Mouth Moves That Blow His Mind!), in the staticky summer cicada-drone coming in through the windows: open yourself up, woman, you need filling, you need fixing, you need re-wiring, give and bleed and give and bleed and give and bleed for as long as your bullshit life will allow. After a while she closes her eyes and thinks of Luna’s mouth and Luna’s arms and Luna’s body pressed up against hers in the buttery midafternoon sunlight, the smell of her hair and the heady warmth of all her skin like a Parrish painting, how her muscles quivered beneath her hands, her thundercloud eyes; she brings herself off roughly, a finger circling almost punishingly hard around her clit until she comes so hard it almost hurts, clenching tight around her fingers, the molten heat-lightning spill pulsing between her legs and through her belly, wild wild wild. The gasp that rips out of her throat sounds like some rough starved beast trying to claw its way out of her insides and her hand is dripping wet with sudden exposure, sudden release.

—

A prolonged confluence of so many things—pain and fear and tectonic shift and expansive arguments and accusations and resentments that hung overhead for days like bad weather—and suddenly she’s Ginny Weasley again, sans ring, sans Mrs., sans the last name that was always two sizes too small, shopping for a flat in Manchester during the limbo before the divorce is finalized and she can move on with her life in quasi-peace in a place where no one looks at her sideways, because here she is no longer the Girl Who Fucked the Boy Who Lived. In the strange off-kilter interim Harry Floos her every other night from his new place in Islington, and they ask about each other’s days and talk about the kids and what they had for dinner and their ongoing race to obtain Muggle driver’s licenses, and she thinks hilariously that they are more gentle with each other, freer and more open now at the ending of things than they ever were in their entire shared history together, from her painful and astronomically confusing eleven-year-old crush through the funeral bells ringing in the dying days of their marriage. The night before last she had called in the middle of Lily’s bath and listened to him getting splashed while he tried to keep James and Albus from throwing earthworms at passersby from the window, and she’d laughed even through the sickly wave of loss and honey-slick nostalgia that knotted up her gut so sweetly she could’ve cried. She didn’t think she had ever loved him more.

Her viewing appointment isn’t for another two hours and Luna’s installed herself at the Working Class Movement Library all day to work on some research she’s hoping to publish—something about the intersection of the Industrial Revolution’s cotton mills and kelpie illness and decline throughout England—so she walks the streets alone in the golden lull like a tourist, the lemon-rich August sunlight and the electric hum of the city buzzing anxiously around her, catching at her heels. It seems so much younger than London ever did, sharp and velvety by turns, a miraculous marvel of antiquity and modernity compressed into the same terrific machine, stretching upwards like a sapling towards the sun. She wants to bring her children here. She wants, strangely, to grow old in this uncertain city full of so much comfortable neon chaos, this place that knows what it means to be lost.

On the verge of evening she walks down Minshull Street, thinking dimly of a future where she can come home with fresh bread and knish from one of the bakeries every night or buy greasy fish and chips if she wants while she scrambles to make the _Prophet_ ’s deadline, smoke cigarettes out of the windows while the evening sky hums with waning effort, put her children to bed in rooms with street-fair art on the walls, secondhand records in stacks, daffodils and tulips in milk bottles along the sunny windowsills. Her mother had frowned deafeningly when Ginny told her she was planning a move to Manchester, which she disapproved of nearly as much as the divorce in the first place: the first woman in the family to divorce for seven generations, the first to split up her children between two cities, the first to abandon the Weasley Values written with fire on brimstone, or whatever. To think she’d once hated Fleur.

“I should have named you Lucretia,” her mother had told her, lips almost disappearing in a fine and familiar grimace. “Your great-grandmother had more sense and no mistake. It’s a good, sturdy name.”

“Isn’t she the one who let the gnomes live in the house and drank buttermilk out of the bottle every evening with pepper?”

“Until the day she died.”

She’d laughed at that, wrung out ragged with grief and fear and the full-body ache that came from sleeping fitfully on Luna’s bony couch. “I don’t think I’m much of a Lucretia,” she said.

“No, dear,” said her mother, whose own mother had named her for a dead sister, an impoverished seamstress who could perform wandless hexes. She smiled then, green-river eyes crinkled with it, and tucked a lock of Ginny’s hair behind her ear. “That’s why I named you Ginevra.”

It’s why she had insisted on sticking Luna’s bells and lillac into her own daughter’s name in the maternity ward at St. Mungo’s, feeling feverish and full of a brutal exultation at the thought of loving her very own daughter. Ginny didn’t care if Lily Luna Potter was sensible. She wanted that moment in her bathroom in May, precarious and irrevocable. She wanted her daughter to be giddy with possibility.

Her eyes are drifting along the water when the pubs and gauzy colors of Canal Street slam into her like a brick wall. Briefly she has a fraught and slightly insane conversation with the fractured bits of the screaming woman that lives in her head regarding the probability of fate and chance and the florid fantasies of her subconscious leading her where she can have all she wants of milk and honey and residual guilt dripping inside like pine sap; somewhere from one of the shopfronts “No One’s Little Girl” is playing. She decides, privately, that it’s chance, because it makes her head feel a little less like exploding into stained-glass confetti.

She decides on a quick drink at a place with bright signs stuck to its white paint that looks like it’s only just opened for the evening. The pub is called Vanilla. The inside is anything but, and by then it’s too late to pretend ignorance.

There are only a few other people drifting around the place this early, a couple at a table and a dark-haired woman at the bar where Ginny takes a seat with only moderate trepidation and orders an amaretto sour. What would her mother think, she wonders, her children, Hermione. It feels exhilarating and transgressive, her nerves jangling like anything could happen here, which is followed with the accompanying clockwork creature that is guilt, thick cords settling into a noose around her neck, as if she’s here to do anything other than have a drink before meeting Luna and seeing someone about a flat this evening. She hasn’t acted irresponsibly: her children are with Harry in London and she has nowhere to be for another two hours. She cleaned the house in Dorset for showing and the deadline on her feature—more political constipation at the Ministry, where the classification of kelpies as Beings was again called into question (“Like I give a fuck,” said one Ginny had interviewed at King’s Sedgemoor over very strong coffee, the sun glinting amber-rich off her skin, “come back when they don’t tear down our homes for not being up to Supreme-y Mugwump-y Wizard-y code.”)—isn’t until late tomorrow afternoon. She’s getting out, like Hermione and Alicia said she should. If she squints at herself hard enough in the mirror she can often pretend to be happy.

Halfway through her drink she begins to feel a heady combination of lightness and an irrepressible liquid buoyancy bursting like champagne bubbles in her head. She’s looking at the art on the walls and thinking about getting another one when the dark-haired woman two seats down turns to her with her brim of her mouth coiling tight like a snake and says, “Weasley. Truly such a shock to find you here. I _never_ expected this of you, not one. Little. Bit.”

Pansy Parkinson is smiling disarmingly across the cherry-blood curl of her lips, her eyes like a glint of light off steel. Cold rocks settle in Ginny’s belly and the amaretto sour turns to acid; why, oh God, does everything in her bullshit life have to be accompanied with the feeling that someone should be recording it all to a laugh track.

“Been a while,” says Pansy when Ginny can’t make her mouth stretch into the shapes of words until the cosmic horror of the entire situation finally registers in full by way of her heart bottoming out acidly in her stomach.

“Could’ve been a lot fucking longer if you ask me,” says Ginny. 

“Jesus Christ,” says Pansy, the smile morphing into a bloody sneer that seems half-disappointed, half-challenging, “how old are you now? Twenty-nine, thirty? Way too old to be acting like a sullen little sixth year shit, but by all means keep up the act, I’m sure it’s doing wonders for your blood pressure.” Ginny takes a drink and stares resolutely forward when Pansy takes the seat beside her.

“What do you want, Parkinson,” she asks, feeling their knees brush when Pansy shifts and then the wintery shiver of her belly as her heart climbs sickeningly into her throat. “Being seen with Harry Potter’s ex-wife in public good for your image as a changed woman, or something?”

“Not a bad idea—maybe you can humor me later actually, but we aren’t exactly in a place frequented by the hoi polloi of our crowd. You’re no good for my reputation here, as much as I know you’d love to pretend otherwise.”

“Where do they—where do we go, then?”

Pansy raises a dark sculpted eyebrow, seafoam fingernails playing around the rim of her tumbler. “There are a few places over by Sackville Gardens—pubs, bookshops. There’s still an old bathhouse, but Muggles can’t see any of it, poor sods. Didn’t you notice?”

“So, what, you come here specifically for Muggles? Far cry from your Hogwarts years if I remember correctly, and I fucking do.”

“And isn’t it _just_ a good thing we’re not all who we were in school forever and some of us grow up and _do things_ and move on and don’t spend the rest of our days acting like our lives ended at Hoggy Warty Hogwarts. And lest you forget, Weasley,” says Pansy, leaning in with every edge of her body so that Ginny has an incredible view of the shadowplay underneath her cheekbones and her frankly impressive cleavage, “you’re here, too. Or did you just like the neighborhood that much?”

Blood rushes to her face. Of course she could tell. Of course other people could see this in her when she still couldn’t unabstract the threads of it in herself. After a moment she pushes her glass away and makes a grab for her purse, but Pansy puts a hand cool with rings around her wrist and squeezes in a way that could by stretch and generosity be called soothing. “Let me buy you another,” she says, darkly insistent, and maybe it’s Pansy’s finger pressing softly over the blue skip of her pulse or the hypnotic vanilla burn of the her perfume, for some fucking reason Ginny lets Pansy Parkinson buy her another amaretto sour.

And another. 

And another.

Somewhere in the increasingly muzzy evening while the pub flares into life and her cheeks warm with something that isn’t shame or humiliation or inadequacy, Ginny finds herself almost wholly happy, relieved, as if her old life is very far away and she could really make a go of it in this strange scarred city. Even more improbably she finds herself actually enjoying Pansy’s company; she’s _hilarious_ , beautiful and fork-tongued a little conniving and wickedly smart and, most jarringly, something in the realm of _kind_ , which is clearly a learned trait. So many people fell through the cracks of the fragmented world in the years after the war, and admittedly Ginny wouldn’t have have cared where Pansy ended up back then as long as it was far away from her and knew the feeling was probably returned in spades. No war is ever over when it’s over; the human dregs ignite and drift like ash until they settle very slowly, long after the fanfare and the blocky headlines have had their day; eleven years on, Ginny is still pulling shrapnel out of her heart and Pansy is still valiantly learning the subtle art of human decency, having recently arrived back in England from Paris, where she lived above a bakery on the better side of Le Marais and got her master’s in witch studies from Sorbonne while Ginny was trying to work her way up the treacherous editorial ladder at _Incantation Weekly_ , a feat that took three years and two furious trips to the editor in chief’s office. And somehow the long smoldering years have brought them here, where they’re sitting at the same bar buying each other drinks, and Ginny is half-envious and half-turned on; it’s funny how these things turn out if you give them a decade to stew.

“You should talk to Luna sometime,” Ginny says to her after Pansy finishes explaining her thesis work, a study of metamorphmagi women and non-men who disguised themselves as sans-culottes during the French Revolution. “She loves this stuff, actually, you’d get on like mad—she’s holed up at the library working on kelpie history right now for some research she’s trying to get published eventually. She’s very concerned with the status of non-humans and women especially, she’s fucking amazing.”

“Shacked up with Lovegood already, have we?”

“No! God, you’re unbelievable.” Pansy’s eyebrows cock viciously halfway up her forehead. “I’m just saying you two would get on, which I can’t believe is a thing I’m saying. If you told me I’d—but anyway, you’d have a lot to talk about.”

“Seems to me you’ve got plenty to talk about yourself, Weasley.”

Ginny shrugs. “Not like the two of you.”

“Of course you do. You’re a woman and you’re sitting in a lesbian pub and you’re not doing the white-picket-fence thing anymore. You spent, what, five years playing a game the Big League Boys still only grudgingly let women into?” Her finger is tapping along to whatever music is playing, something with loud drums like a trance or ritual. “I figured you’d go back but given all the bullshit maybe it’s not so surprising. I couldn’t do it.”

“With the kids and everything else it was just like, I don’t know, too much, with everyone always wanting something—my kids and Harry and the team and the _Prophet_ —and for the longest time I felt guilty or like I hadn’t been good enough because I couldn’t do it anymore. They say they want us there and then spend every waking minute making us as unwelcome as they possibly can, and the thing is they can just walk away from it all. If you have a bad time or you quit or you get pregnant, Merlin and Morgana help you, all they remember is that you failed. None of the good. Just that you were shit and there’s always going to be a better woman than you with bigger tits or better legs too and you’re supposed to hate her and yourself.”

“Divide and conquer. Slash and burn. That’s how they do it to us.”

“I used to feel like a doll sometimes,” says Ginny, words unspooling out of her, “made of meat or something. Like one of those drawings in a butcher’s shop with the cuts of meat labelled with dotted lines.”

“And now?”

“I still do,” she says. “It’s like there’s me and there’s the million things I’m supposed to be and I feel like I’m this walking schism. I can’t make myself fit where I’ve tried.”

“That’s because it’s like trying to shove yourself through a pinhole,” says Pansy. Over the bottom of her lip Ginny can see the flash of eyeteeth. “Bullshit of incomparable magnitude.”

“Yes,” says Ginny. “So why’d you end up back here? I mean, not to be an ass or anything.”

“That’s almost considerate, have you learned some tact in the interim?”

“I mean Paris was basically a blank slate for you—why come back after all that bettering yourself and learning the error of Wizarding Ways and et cetera?”

“Time away can do you good. It isn’t healthy to just keep rubbing your face in the same mistakes and the same environment day in day out, especially when the magical world is in the sort of chaotic flux it was—”

“Why did _you_ come back, is what I asked. Not for the magi-sociology lecture.”

“Why? Didn’t miss me, did you?”

“Not even once, but it’s good to see you, for some reason.”

“Careful or I’ll think you’re coming on to me, Weasley,” says Pansy, laughing and unhelpfully patting Ginny’s back when she chokes hideously on her drink. “Be nice and I might let you lick the soles of my shoes.”

“Fuck off.”

“I think,” says Pansy, with only a specter of a smile as the laugher peals away, “it was mostly too much for me at once. This is my home, too, and I think at some point I recognized that it was going to change, and I needed to change with it or get out. Getting out helped me catch up, I think, or at the very least it let me see things from new angles for the first time and decide things for myself instead of getting told, like, this is how it is and this is how you have to think. You know what it’s like. I’m not trying to make excuses, I know what I was and I know who I am and I know that’s part of it, but I didn’t want to come back until I sorted the shit from my brain space, which as your clever eyeballs can see is an ongoing process.”

They wind up finishing the last of their drinks in silence. For the first time since that afternoon in her baking-hot bathroom in Dorset with Luna, Ginny thinks that this is the warm blank space where something is meant to happen, where she could let herself fall without being pushed. “Are you living here?” she asks, tapping her bitten-down thumb nail against the rim of her glass. “It’s just, Manchester doesn’t exactly ooze Pansy Parkinson.”

“It doesn’t scream Mother Nature’s daughter Ginny Weasley either but here you are drinking on my tab. And yes. I’ve got a place in Wigan and I’m working with the local Department of Inter-Magical Cooperation on a squib outreach program. In my free time I rescue woodland creatures and organize poetry readings at the senior center.”

“Don’t strain anything patting yourself on the back.”

“Fuck off Weasley, it was a joke,” says Pansy, laughing low and looking at her with a sort of quick appraisal that makes Ginny’s stomach turns over in a strange balletic tumult. “I’m a work in progress.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Mm. I don’t think we’re ever _not_. When you’re sixty you won’t be who you were at fifty and you’ll hopefully have figured out how to pull by then.”

“Asshole.”

“Jesus, Weasley, not in front of people.”

“Were you always like this and I just didn’t notice? It’s not exactly appealing.”

“See what I mean? No subtlety at all.”

“I never really learned how. I never had the chance,” says Ginny, feeling loose and electric. “It’s funny. I just thought, y’know, you get used to feeling scrambled like a bunch of mismatched doll pieces or cutting yourself up when you look in the mirror.”

“To an extent.” Pansy signals to the bartender, silver rings flashing. “I think it’s part of the long division of being a woman. It’s why you have to learn to sift through the shit they fill you with from the moment you can breathe. Also why you didn’t walk into a place like this until you were near-on thirty years old. Some of the metamorphmagi I talked to were well into middle or old age before they understood the extent of their power.”

Ginny follows her outside and lights her cigarette with a crook of her forefinger, one hand cupped rather unnecessarily around the flame. She thinks she knows what to fill this space with but she’s never done it before, not with anyone, because she’s never had the opportunity and because she isn’t the sort of person who does this. Pansy watches her pull in a drag with lean, shadowy satisfaction, and Ginny sees, in quick stifled glances, the arch of her eyebrows, a shade of meaning in the fluid red red curve of her lips around her lit cigarette.

“I’d love to see your work,” she says.

Pansy laughs out smoke. “I’ve got a couple hours to kill,” she says, “let’s get a cab, the best spot to Apparate’s three blocks from here. Your turn to pay, by the way. If I have to wait for you to learn proper etiquette the ice caps will have melted before you can manage it on your own, and who’s got time for that.”

They spend the ride sitting on very opposite ends of the cab until it pulls up in front of Pansy’s flat, a big brick place with a wrought-iron fence and heavy white doors and an ostentatious amount of flowers in the boxes outside each window, not nearly as brutalist chic as Ginny would’ve expected but somehow it suits, holy clutter and all; they actually do look at some of Pansy’s research in her tiny sunlit study with its gauzy thrift store curtains, the evening rusting away in the sky and the shadows just starting to lengthen on the walls. She watches Pansy bend over the desk to show her a photo of a march she’d gone to advocating for veela-witch relations and has a prolonged mental shouting match with herself regarding the propriety of staring openly at Pansy’s ass when she’s meant to be paying polite friendly attention to such immeasurable, important work. She berates herself; she soothes her conscience with the knowledge that she is at least not a man deciding what cut he wants to eat; she berates herself again because is that any better; she’s suffocating a little with the thunderous gut-fear of it, bright hard worry and sickness and desire and the swelling uncertain guilt of everything until, when Pansy finally turns around again, she can only think on infinite tidal loop like ritual, like reverb in a song: Kiss me kiss me kiss me, kiss me out of my fucking head, kiss the hunger out of me.

Her back hits the wall hard but she hardly even cares with Pansy’s mouth on her throat and her hands riding up her ribs. They move to the bedroom in uncoordinated slideshow progression, steered by too many legs and a blind desire for more, closer, like breathing in the golden glowing swell of someone else’s magic for the first time; she lets Pansy pull off her shirt somewhere in the narrow hallway and her bra follows in the doorway as she tugs at Pansy’s too-tight jeans, which Pansy takes off herself while Ginny’s heart begins to throb in her throat. They kiss again, deeply; the sun filtering through the thin curtains gives everything a submarinean coral tinge, the evening beginning to unfurl in reds and golds like crepe paper, and she has to bury her fingers in Pansy’s hair to keep them from shaking when she undoes her button to pull her jeans down her thighs.

“For the record, I’ve never, ever done this before. With, I mean, a woman,” she says in a half-gasp beneath Pansy’s mouth, which is sucking a hot budlike mark into her neck. “So I don’t want to hear any complaints.”

“That’s alright.”

“You know I’m still technically married,” Ginny says stupidly. Her belly is quivering against Pansy’s lips, skating across her bellybutton and the unsafe, secret place where her children grew. It doesn’t stop when Pansy looks up at her from where she’s kneeling between her legs and runs her palms wildly up Ginny’s stomach to her breasts, squeezing gently, a knee pressing into the wet spot between her legs, making her whole body shudder like a livewire deep down, all the way to the core or the meat of her soul or the ganglion threads that hold her bits together in a cohesive human shape. The torturous rusty-hot wind coming in from the window makes her skin prickle in a tremor, waves of goosebumps rising from her arms to her belly and the insides of her thighs like heat trails beneath Pansy’s fingers.

“Did I ask, Weasley,” she says, eyes stone-shrewd and searching, her fingertips riding shiveringly over Ginny’s ribs and back down to her hips. Then she leans back down and laps at the hard swell of Ginny’s clit, two fingers circling around the very edges of the wet place beneath it, and Ginny tips her head back on the pillow and very nearly sobs with the raw splitting pleasure of it, the sweet ineffable ache of yearning for what has escaped her, for what she couldn’t contain or understand.

She comes twice in quick succession and manages to get Pansy there too after some coaxing and delirious experimentation that had her digging searing invectives into Ginny’s shoulder with her fingernails; again, later, with the taste of silvery salt still on her mouth, back pressed against Pansy’s chest, heartbeat through her spine-rungs like a war drum while Ginny held her wrist in place, rocking into the thrust of Pansy’s fingers up to the second knuckle, feeling the swallowing grip of herself in the crook of the fingers inside her, and then the flow back out again, tracing slow spiral-streaks around the very outline of her clit so deliberately Ginny bit through her lip before Pansy finally pressed her fingers slickly over it in a curlicue wave and she came with her fingers digging into Pansy’s thigh, the jagged crenellation of teeth dragging over her shoulder, almost painful in the long shattered moment, the curtains still open and the night wind and the murmur of the city music jangling along the wires of her body. Later, with the damp sheet and the duvet kicked down to the foot of the bed and her limbs like extraordinary jelly, feeling slightly sore and wide open to the world, she wonders if this is something she’ll have to learn to be more open about now, this naked starved thing stumbling into the sunlight like a foal on its new legs. When she asks Pansy she just shrugs through a mouthful of the cashew curry they’re sharing.

“That’s your business and only your business,” she says, covering her mouth and reaching for the bottle of cheap merlot they’re sharing. With her eyebrows set in the honeyed light of the bedside oil lamp she reminds Ginny of a Barbara Kruger print, bold print, incriminating reds. “Fuck anybody who tries to tell you otherwise.”

“Oh, _that’s_ real helpful,” snaps Ginny, chewing a fingernail. “I don’t even know how I’d tell my kids. Christ Jesus, my mum’ll probably dig herself a grave out back and go lie in it.”

“Can’t help you there, Weasley. Your kids will be fine, I’m sure—sometimes I think they’ve got more sense than any of the rest of us because they’re _not_ the rest of us yet, you know?”

Her children. Suddenly the memory of appointments and promises and responsibility curdles in her belly in a nauseating slow-motion swirl and then pounds through her veins like an incessant alarm. She’d left her Muggle phone in her purse earlier, long forgotten at the kitchen table, and the night is already advancing in neon lights and thick cloudy waves outside the window; she throws herself off the bed, still naked, and begins to gather the breadcrumb trail of her clothes, yanking them on fast as she swears fluently and makes plans to Floo Pansy the next day. 

“So what do we do now,” asks Ginny, pulling her underwear back on at the nighttime window, “about this?”

“Do we need to negotiate it? We can talk it out later, see where things go, so please stop looking like you’re about to have an aneurysm. St. Mungo’s is like, eight Apparition points away at least.”

“Nine actually,” says Ginny, though she’s actually just caught sight of the hickey on her ass in the mirror over Pansy’s dresser and cannot remember when, if ever, that’s happened before. Her bra seems to have been sucked into the fabric of space-time itself, and by the time she gives up looking for it Pansy is already leaning in, still disarmingly naked, and kissing her goodnight; Ginny runs a hand thrillingly down her flank, feeling altogether happier than she thought she might to have had her fault lines shot to rubble over the course of a single evening. “Are you absolutely sure you want—?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it,” says Pansy, stretching, her back curving like a nautilus, teeth catching the summer night-light. “Besides, you still owe me a trip to London so I can be seen having a polite drink with Potter’s ex. Law of equivalent exchange or something.”

“Did you actually pay attention in magical theory? I didn’t know you took subjects that needed like, actual thought.”

“Don’t be an idiot, I was hooking up with Daphne Greengrass back then and she was taking it.”

“Those are some lofty ambitions,” says Ginny. “I bet you think that’s the most scandalous thing anyone’s ever done at Hogwarts.”

“Jealous? Of her, or me?” Pansy bites down at the juncture of Ginny’s neck and shoulder, making sure to leave a mark; Ginny shivers like January. “As far as that goes I’m miles beyond the likes of _you_ , Weasley,” she sneers, leaning away again when Ginny aims a kiss at the hollow of her throat. “And I’m not joking—Floo me tomorrow, I don’t plan to stay away from London forever and don’t act like that last one wasn’t the best orgasm of your life. You owe me.”

Rather sooner than she wants she pulls away and Apparates to one of the designated shop rooms in Summerseat, cushioned accordingly, and then again back to Luna’s flat in Oldham, only stumbling a little on her feet, where Luna herself is stretched out on the loveseat, knees hanging off the side with a copy of _The Quibbler_ held fanlike in front of her face. The lead story heralds a groundbreaking connection between ancient magical landmarks and the Bristol Hum; she’s getting ready to ask if she can borrow it for some bedtime reading when Luna puts the front page down and smiles at her, her face full of the muted orange haze of the lampshade she’s draped with a scarf.

“Hello there,” says Luna, as if Ginny comes by often looking like she’s just had the best fuck of her life and obviously braless. “You missed your appointment. They said they’d reschedule if you want but I think Harry was a little worried. He said you weren’t answering your phone, either.”

“Ah. I got caught up,” she says, feeling again her heart and guts and groin braid themselves into a guilty knot, tugging, tugging.

“So I see.”

“Pansy Parkinson says hello.”

Luna’s mouth twitches into a shape Ginny isn’t sure she would have recognized before but sees now as something in the neighborhood of shared conspiracy: something secret and primal that is legible in their movements, their shadowed glances. “Is that all she said?”

“She spoke at length about Paris and she knows about fifteen horrible euphemisms for, uh, lip service.”

“What’s that?”

Given that she’s standing in Luna’s flat with her mouth still tasting like the shortbread Pansy was eating and her underwear still wet between her legs, she supposes trying to keep up any pretense would be a joke tantamount to slapping a gauzy bandage on a blaring neon exclamation, so instead she leans back against the wall and says, “I didn’t know there were that many words for getting eaten out. I mean some, yeah, but no one’s ever told me they were going to eat my pussy like a grapefruit before, and it was kind of hilarious,” she says in a wild rush. “It was an _education_ , Luna, is what I’m saying.”

“You mean cunnilingus. I see she taught them to you.”

“That’s such an ugly word.”

“It isn’t,” says Luna, laughing in that slightly breathless way she always has, like she’s just had an illuminating revelation. For someone who so utterly inhabits her own head as fully as Luna does, maybe that’s not far off the mark. “Termagant. Pustule. Those are ugly words.”

In the sleepy symphonic light of the flat Ginny can see the freckles dotting Luna’s nose and chest, the rhythmic rise and fall of her ribs, the bright blonde spill of hair that’s fallen out of its low chignon and curls ghostly across her shoulder. Now that she knows roughly what it might be like she finds herself unable to stop thinking of Luna underneath her, an approximation of primacy, the fruit of her mouth, desire hot like an electrical current in the places where their skin might touch. Kissing her would be like a dream, she thinks insanely, compulsion in it, ethereal, like coming untethered in the wind and the rain. Even now the thought of it is enough to make her feel like a fork-tongued voyeur, always the predator, the interloper, the alien, every inch a female vampire from one of those old Muggle films who seduces vulnerable young women and drinks their blood while the dramatic music swells to a shrieking crescendo against the black and white horror show. Whether it comes from the same brittle shame strung through her vein-lines or the self-hating choking poison she’s been taught to nurture or the fear churning always beneath everything else, she doesn’t know; some nights, after the bad dreams, she imagines pulling it out of herself like leeches, going fishing for bad memories and bad blood to pour them out into a Pensieve. Having the courage to put your mouth to the wound and suck the venom out is what only we know, she thinks, spiritus mundi of blood and poison and rebirth, the unending umbilical chain. They would tremble beneath this, the nerve to brand yourself on your own terms. Their knees would buckle with the weight.

Once she excuses herself to the kitchen she catches her reflection on accident in the mirror next to the balcony door, and for the first time in years she sees herself: her hair windblown like a thick tangle of ivy vines where it’s come out of its braid, two considerable bruises blossoming in wine-dark asymmetry at her neck and collarbone where her blue flannel is unbuttoned, bitten-red, kiss-soft lips; she can feel sweat still cooling on her forehead, and on her clothes and skin she smells sex and wine and Pansy’s smoky Shalimar, cigarette ash smudged on her jeans and her heavy leather boots, color high on her pale cheeks and her long nose beneath the summer-scatter of freckles. She stares at herself while she calls Harry, watching the movements of her mouth around each word, the shape of her breasts in her shirt, eyes blinking, throat convulsing in laughter. Her daughter and her sons clamor for the phone halfway across the country while she watches the skip of the pulse in her neck, smile sharpening, muscles contracting, heart beating, _I am, I am, I am_. She does not tell Harry where she’s been. She grins at the lavish audacity of her own reflection, unpeeled like fruit or a wedding veil, at the symphonic pitch of the night that is hers. She gives; she withholds.

—

The place where she’s staying with Luna in Plovdiv is rumored to be haunted like the city itself, a russet-colored Renaissance leftover with shutters on the windows at the edge of the Old Town where, it is said, a kelpie was imprisoned as a wizard nobleman’s unwilling wife until she took exact and brutal vengeance on him one night with a meat mallet, and then her teeth. She herself was killed before she could reach the banks of the Maritsa that were her home, and so the local magical folks say that she can be heard trying to open windows and doors late at night, a perpetually trapped infernal prisoner. Indeed Ginny did wake once just before dawn to find her door ajar, and another time to a strange frantic scrabbling, the investigation of which turned up long scratches around the deadbolt at the front door that she couldn’t remember being there before. Since it’s warm enough Ginny always leaves the windows open for her; she remembers the heat of the bathroom in Dorset and her doll parts bent and boxed in like bird wings.

Six months prior she’d gotten a job as a staff writer at the _Magical Advocate_ after she’d applied on a whim and they’d been impressed with her series on the Harpies’ new half-giant beater that ran in the _Prophet_ last year; now, out on her first major assignment with Luna—there for fieldwork on her magizoology doctorate and continued non-human advocacy, and also nargles—she is learning halting Bulgarian by day and ruthlessly breaking in a new pair of boots in the trek back up the hills every night, her head full of words like bright gushes of color, ripe to bursting.

Some nights they cast _cave inimicum_ near the water and camp along the river bank to the far south of the city, sleeping on the fecund green earth where the Rhodopes blur indelibly into the Upper Thracian Plain. Every morning Ginny wakes up with the land pulsing beneath her back like some great shifting behemoth, the vastness of the world spread out in unending abundance, fed with the blood of the Maritsa that births and nurtures and takes its richness back into itself as voraciously as it gives; for no real reason it makes her think of Muggle Studies in fifth year and the unit on creation myths, the image of the woman they said was the first woman looking out at the great unpeopled earth beyond Havilah and the Euphrates with wonder and with fear. The air here crackles with unsuppressed magic, blessed and cursed.

“I’m just saying,” Luna is telling her, throwing her apple core into the thick green tangle of forest, “a little Mermish will get you a long way with them. They like mermaids better than they’ll ever like humans and we’re invading their territory, after all. Want me to quiz you on your verbs?”

“Doesn’t Mermish like, not even work properly when you’re breathing air? Everyone says you can only speak it underwater.”

“That’s a lie the Beast Division started—oh, probably four or five centuries ago now, which they spread around to discourage merfolk from communicating with humans, or humans learning Mermish. They’re supposed to speak on our terms or nothing, is what they want.”

“Is there any corner of the planet we haven’t razed and burned and sucked dry like a bunch of persistent leeches?”

Luna cocks her head, considering, eyes on the golden blur of the spreading sunset. “I don’t think so. There are a few isolated werewolf packs in Siberia and Newfoundland that still speak their own languages or maintain select among ancient dialects, and there’s at least one nomadic veela clan that does too. If you just think of your mouth like a sort of conduit it works better, I promise.”

“I’ve tried. My tongue doesn’t twist that way, remember?”

“But it’s the thought that counts. They’ll appreciate the effort, is what I’m saying.”

“You mean they won’t talk to me _and_ they’ll spent the rest of their lives making fun of me.”

“Well, yes,” says Luna, like it’s obvious. At thirty-two she still doesn’t look so much different from twenty-two: the same long unbrushed hair and wide eyes and penchant for screamingly loud colors draped over everything, a spine that bends like a willow whenever she laughs. There is a new and hungry intensity to her, sharp as a bone shard, an urgency to be heard that wasn’t there ten years ago, and everything in Ginny understands it as the same clamor she feels too, the voice that she couldn’t hear for so long, buried deep inside her and choked out with overgrowth. “But at least they’ll have something to laugh at. Fodder for a lifetime of inside jokes.”

“So then why don’t you go talk Mermish at them.”

“I’m not the one writing an article about them, Ginny. Also, you’re afraid of them.”

“And you’re not?”

“I used to be,” says Luna, “but they do not hunt humans without reason. All they want is a place and a say in the world they live in and not to be hurt. And we’ve hurt them.”

“It’s just that I don’t see them being impressed with humans who still just want something in the end. We show up and make demands and say it’s for their own good. Who has time for that shit.”

“And they’d be right,” says Luna. She leans over and brushes a beetle off Ginny’s collar with a strange reverence. “Let’s have some pudding and wait by the bank. I’m sure one of them will turn back up. Everything turns back up one way or another, whether you want it to or not.”

By the river’s edge Luna dangles her bare feet into the water while Ginny tucks her own carefully underneath her, running her palm over the wildflowers dotting the grass. The Maritsa is gouged wide here, a fearless, irresistible curve guarding life within its quiet depths; for a while, she watches Luna running her fingers through her uncombed hair and listening to her Walkman—the same one she enchanted to play tapes in reverse when they were fourteen so they could get stoned and listen to _Come Away with ESG_ forwards and backwards—while the first nightbirds start to cry out overhead as if in penance, wondering, always, what it would be like to kiss her here where the earth holds them in its palm like supplicants. She supposes she’s bolder in everything now, as Pansy—good friend, occasional fuck, infuriating confidant—has told her loudly and often, usually when Ginny is muttering an incredibly erotic spell against the insides of her knees, but with Luna it’s impossible to tell whether anything she says or does can be mined for concealed intent, and Ginny has given up trying to decipher the enigma of the puzzle of the magical trapdoor conundrum of Luna Lovegood’s wild animal soul. It’s like taking a compass into space.

A noise like a lit fuse hissing away draws her eye to the log behind her where she finds the same kelpie she spoke to yesterday, wringing out her dark hair with a raw dagger-green magic that makes Ginny’s skin prickle. She grins at them with altogether too many teeth.

“I already told you I’m not showing my tits for your magazine gratis. I know how you people work. Pay me first and then we’ll talk.”

“I have three galleons,” says Luna, leaning back on the heels of her hands. “And half a sandwich leftover.”

“I can’t give her anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a violation of—of _everything_! I’ll get sacked if anyone finds out and not to mention you can’t trust answers that are essentially _bribed_ to be truly honest or representative of the situation. Journalistic integrity and what-all.”

“Typical human,” says the kelpie, yawning so widely her jaw seems to come completely unhinged. “You trespass on our lands which you’ve forced us out to in the first place and you bleed the waters dry. Then you try to force us out of _those_ and you dump toxic waste into the rivers and you want to talk about your nonexistent integrity. Only your kind would come here without so much as offering me dinner.”

“You can have the rest of my sandwich,” says Luna, and leans over to give it to her. “I’m not the one asking the questions.”

“This one has some sense,” she says, chewing very slowly. “You should listen to her.”

“I was hoping to ask you a few questions, if that’s alright,” Ginny ventures for the third time this week. “You need protection and people need to understand. That’s what I’m aiming for. We’ve been poisoning you for well over a century and everyone turns a blind eye. You shouldn’t be quarantined like cattle and I swear, we just want to hear what you have to say.” The kelpie frowns, loudly.

“You still don’t get it,” she says. “You stupid motherfuckers never will. And I know my tits _are_ fantastic but no one’s tits ever got Muggle pesticides out of the rivers or Wizards to get off their asses and develop better spells to purify the lakes or give us jobs. Definitely they could get me killed. For that matter you might want to watch out, yourself.”

“I know it,” she says. “I’ve always known it. That I don’t sleep with them makes it worse. And I have a daughter who will grow up in this world,” she says, and no more, because that is all that needs to be said. “Above all else men are taught to overlook the destruction they commit all around them. And we’re taught to bear the pain of it obediently like the vessels we are told to be.”

“It’s not the same thing, you know.”

“No,” Ginny agrees, “it’s not.”

Luna comes to sit beside her, feet making ripples in the clear blue waters where the violet sky is reflected mournfully with the lemon drop moon. When she puts her hand on Ginny’s back she shivers in what she hopes dearly isn’t a telltale tremor, but Luna just spreads her fingers out to feel the laddered notches of her vertebra bent in a lenient weeping-willow curve. “Do you have a name?” Luna asks, and the kelpie makes a face.

“Everything has a name.”

“Mine’s Ginevra,” says Ginny, unbidden. “My mother named me for a woman we kept in the attic.”

“What kind of name is _that_.”

The kelpie pushes off her log and submerges again up to her chin, swimming against the current to the bank where they’re sitting. When she climbs out Ginny can see the rangy cords of muscles in her arms and legs, like a thing sculpted fully-formed from the river itself in the hundred-year storms; again, she thinks of creation myths, woman cast out of her only home and told to endure and endure and endure.

“You’ll just mangle mine,” she says, stretching her long limbs out on the grass, ragged fingernails catching in the larkspur along the silty shore. There is an ache in her, Ginny thinks, enough to flood entire cities. “If I don’t like your questions I won’t answer. And if you don’t like that you’d better pay me off good and bring me a fucking steak next time, real rare. Like, still-bleeding-rare.”

Back at their campsite in the swallowing shadows of the trees, Ginny gathers heat in her thoughts and lights a fire while Luna casts a quick _impervious_ over them for the night to repel the coming rain. The darkness advances with a breeze that brings with it, like a scent, the nostalgia of so many evenings spent like this at Hogwarts and at home in Manchester: writing by the infrequent flame of a fireplace with her children in bed and a quill scratching against the parchment in musical motion, or the loamy-sweet give of the Quidditch pitch after a match, flying as high as she dared until everything looked smaller and she felt invincible, full of an inviolable sense of purpose, an uncontainable hunger for herself and the waking world. More than anything she feels caught between the rock and the precipice, full of the promise of flight. She wants to leave something here, buried in the womb of the earth.

Luna presses up beside her, chin on Ginny’s shoulder, which would make her fingers stutter if she wasn’t used to it by now. She writes out the word _interminable_ and breathes in the whisper of summertime thunder and Luna’s skin, a powdery lilac thing with clean sweat underneath. It seems improbable suddenly that she could know the exact shade of grey in Luna’s eyes or her favorite words or the blue skip of veins in her wrist but not the war-drum quickening of her heart, the feeling of her ribs swelling and deflating against Ginny’s. They have lived so much together, so closely.

Ginny wonders what it would be like to kiss her.

“Are you going to write a bit on the MLE’s retention of the aquatic aliens at Derwentwater? They were supposedly assisted by some kelpies who escaped before the Aurors got there. I have some skin samples.”

“I can’t do that because one, it’s a myth, and two, this is specifically about kelpies and I don’t want to veer too far off track.” She leans back against Luna, shifting her weight very slightly so that she can feel Luna’s breath on the back of her neck. “You read too many conspiracy theories. It really isn’t good for the whole maintaining a grip on reality thing.”

“You need to watch more Muggle television.”

“It always takes forever to get anywhere and by the time it does I’ve lost the thread and someone’s taking a gun out of his pants,” she says. Behind her, Luna turns her head so that her nose is pressed against Ginny’s temple where her pulse begins to run in a rapid red river-hum. “And mine’s still broken from when Lily tried to figure out where the little people were living.”

“She’s such a bright girl.”

“I named her for the best and the purple-est.”

“That’s a good feeling,” says Luna, “that someone wants to say your name.” They’re quiet for a while, two notes bearing themselves up into the music of the night until the rhythm breaks again and Luna says, “You know, you’re still very red. You always have been.”

“The Weasleys are a humble folk with powerful genetics.”

“No,” says Luna, her laugh ruffling Ginny’s hair, “that’s not what I mean. You’re red. You are a red woman. You make me feel,” she pauses, making a motion with her hand that Ginny doesn’t understand, “like exploding, sometimes. In confetti-bursts, with minimal bloody gristle.”

The wind stirs again and Ginny’s heart stirs with it, blood tingling through her limbs in waves. Still she cannot turn around. “I had wondered,” she says, idiotically, “if I’m not—misunderstanding, that is, because sometimes you know I, I don’t always catch these things.”

“But you were too afraid to say anything.”

“That isn’t,” she says. The tongue is such a heavy, nervous barricade between the mouth and the brain. On an impulse she can’t name she reaches over and takes Luna’s hand in the dark, watching where their shadows have melded together in the thorny brush as she traces, delicately, across the long narrow fingers, the lifeline, the dip between each individual knuckle down to the spidery veins below. “I couldn’t. I didn’t know.”

“It’s alright. It’s like when you didn’t realize you were reading the wrong horoscope all sixth year til I told you.”

“Til you gave me some weird moon sign that doesn’t even exist.”

“Like I said, til I set you straight once your aura started to darken. I think that was around the time Padma Patil stopped buttoning her shirts all the way.”

“Fine. I suppose, yes, it’s a little like that,” she says. Luna turns her hand over and twines their fingers together, tightening, like they’re both shipwrecked survivors. “Or like, not being able to hear the sound of your own heart over the screaming in your head.”

“Also because you spent the entirety of seventh year completely pissed.”

“And I guess _you_ were just too occupied with the depths of your sobriety to notice anything. More like you couldn’t tell any better than me.”

“I used to have dreams about you,” says Luna. “When we were younger.”

Ginny feels like all the breath has just been knocked out of her lungs, almost dizzy with the Luna’s wild feral swings from funny to solemnity that have always left her weak-middled. “Good ones?” she asks, tightly.

“Always,” says Luna, “they always are. Even—even now, maybe especially now, it’s like I turn around not expecting to find you but it’s always you. I think it was always going to be you.” They laugh, breathlessly, unbelievingly. Then Ginny surges forward and kisses the laughter out of Luna’s bright mouth.

It feels, more than anything, like the logical conclusion of fifteen years spent with some unutterable, unrecognizable longing simmering beneath her skin, even the parts where they bump foreheads and Luna’s teeth catch so hard on her bottom lip it bleeds. When Ginny pulls back their eyes flicker open again and then she’s pressing Luna down by the shoulders against the ground where she can see her eyes blown open like Ginny is the only thing she can see, almost prayerful, clutching at her back until Ginny slots their bodies together again like two jagged pieces of a broken thing, their hands moving with frantic, clumsy reverence. Finally Ginny draws back again, panting, nose pressed to the crook of Luna’s shoulder where she sucks something sweet and runic into her skin, tasting the bitter salt-rime of sweat and rain. She feels like a livewire, or a meteor, ready to pound an impact radius like an explosive fist.

“Your heart,” says Luna in a voice that would be conversational if it weren’t for the silvery tremble in her breath, “your heart is shaking like a leaf.”

Her skin is trembling all over such that it’s a torture not to be touching Luna. Underneath her shirt Luna has pressed her heavy palm between Ginny’s breasts so that it rests like a moth against the join of her bra, right over her heart, where it’s beating like a ticking time bomb beneath Luna’s fingers. “Because I can’t believe this is actually _happening_. You’re—Christ, you’ve been my best friend since we were kids. I thought you’d, I just—I never imagined you _would_. That you’d ever want this.”

“I think I’ve always wanted you. Differently, maybe, but I think when it changes with you, you’re not getting rid of it,” says Luna, pulling Ginny’s shirt over her head, her blue eyes huge and wet, yearning, “I think the difference between friends and naked friends is a hair’s breadth. I think—I think that’s the difference between a lot of things really.”

Certainly it is the difference between Luna clothed and Luna starkly naked on the grass, which proves an easy task given that Luna isn’t wearing underwear. Their arms brush thrillingly as they weave in and out of each other, not stopping until Ginny pulls back again to look at her in the orange fire-lit spill getting between the places where their bodies touch. She’s unreal: blonde hair spread in a tangled veil over her breasts and her back arching indulgently like one of Modigliani’s reclining women, assured simultaneously of her own power and of her own ecstatic vulnerability in this, bearing up all her wide-open longing to Ginny in the brittle clench of her jawline, the trembling of her fingers, the quickening rise and fall of her breasts.

“Come here,” she says to Luna in a sort of wonder, and watches her sit up again. They flow into each other, Luna’s knees landing on either side of Ginny’s hips and her hands tightening wildly around her shoulders, each watching the other, until Ginny kisses her again with Luna’s fingers trailing wildly down the length of her body down to the wiry corkscrews between her legs so that she starts to feel feverish in the places where their skin isn’t touching. She slides her slick hands up Luna’s thighs and squeezes her ass, making her laugh her bright bell-jangle laugh against the side of Ginny’s throat, tongue flat at the pulse-point like she’s painting the taste of it across her skin; Ginny, feeling her own daring as a catalyst, slips a hand between Luna’s thighs and runs her finger over the blood-hot hole there, pressing in shallowly with just a fingertip and feeling Luna flex and spasm around it, starved, watching with a possessing compulsion as she slides the same fingertip up to Luna’s clit, feeling swallowed. Again their bodies seem to move in an irresistible electric wave, her finger rubbing runic and slow with an unfurling wonder across the very dark edge of her lips, Luna’s hips jumping sharply. When she draws her middle finger delicately underneath the hard swell of her clit Luna tips her head back to the big star-veined sky over the whole of the river plain, where Ginny can see the violin vibrations quivering reflexively deep in her throat when her breath catches, like tape hiss, a desperate broken chord.

All the way into the ancient blood of the earth she swears she can feel the extraordinary shift of their bodies down deep as if they’ve just been born and are still drawn in some umbilical possession to the invincible pulse of it. Luna reaches down and presses her palm between Ginny’s legs, pressing something molten into the bone-ridge there, grinding down hard until Ginny drags her mouth across her ribs and sucks something rough into her skin, making Luna’s heart slam hard against her tongue.

“Wait,” says Ginny, “just, just wait, for now, please.”

“I have been,” says Luna. Whatever else she means to say, she never finishes.

She runs her knuckles along the slick folds beneath Luna’s clit and feels them dampen with the frenzy of the act while her own blood throbs in her ears. She presses two fingers inside Luna to the second knuckle, deep into the obscenely warm heartbeat-heat of her, and Luna takes them inside so easily that Ginny adds a third and crooks them gently, until Luna rocks her hips forward, choking off a moan, and Ginny feels her heart pulsating in her whole body, between her thighs, in her fingers flexing inside of Luna like something devoured. Absurdly she thinks she will never leave this place, that some part of her will always be buried here, as inextricable as the river current and the murmur of the stars overhead; this is indelibility, this holy compulsion. 

“ _Ginny_ ,” Luna whispers on the thread of her ragged breath, her hands skittering up and down Ginny’s arms, “have you been doing press-ups?”

“Every other day,” she says, hinging, insanely, on laughter. With her thumb she teases Luna’s clit, watching her mouth fall open as she grinds down into her hand, _hard_ , biting off a moan behind her teeth. "Why, you want to try it with me?”

“I think my record is four,” says Luna. They laugh again, whisperingly, and the breeze murmurs in their hair, almost torturous against her bare skin, searing the sweat onto her back. There is such a fine power in this, a primal beauty that comes from so much inviolable trust, so much careful control; she leans forward and catches Luna’s nipple between her teeth, sucking it into her mouth and flicking her tongue across it in time with her thumb rubbing lazily over her clit, all orchestrated by the wave of Luna’s body arched over hers in a tight crescendo, rising and falling.

Their pattern shifts and she hears Luna cry out something she feels in a deep thunder-crush against her tongue, listening to the tectonic rhythm deep within her body while the pace quickens. Ginny feels Luna’s hips stutter when she brushes her thumb relentlessly over her clit, and then it’s like a strike of flint or lightning: she feels the tightening spasm around her fingers in a surge of heat and Luna comes, laughing as her fingers curl into Ginny’s shoulders. Each shudder of her body on Ginny’s hand brings another wild, loopy peal of laughter, a thing conjured from the forest or the river or the spirit of the earth itself; she is not of this world, Ginny thinks, letting Luna lift her face by the chin to kiss her, feeling Luna’s fingers in her sweaty hair and the shock of delight in the laugh she finds under her tongue which, once swallowed, she can’t keep from bubbling out of her own throat.

“You’re very serious about this,” says Luna. She winces slightly when Ginny pulls her fingers gently out of her and runs them up the soft bone-slope of her hip to her belly. The sound that pushes out of Luna at the loss shakes down inside of Ginny, and her grip involuntarily tightens at Luna’s hip. “I had no idea.”

“I’m in this,” says Ginny, going down where she’s pushed when Luna shoves at her shoulders, “every bit. For as long as—for however we fucking want it. How’s that.”

“I think it’s fucking meteoric,” says Luna, and Ginny chokes out something that is half-laughter and half-sob and reaches for Luna again, kissing her slowly until their eyes flicker open again, teeth to teeth. She can feel the crenellations of grass and broken wildflower stems underneath her back and thighs when Luna slides down to her navel, making the muscles tremble in rubber band contractions while Ginny watches the progression of her hands moving along the landmarks of her body in a slow snow-melt, making her shiver in the cradle of the ground.

“You’re so beautiful,” Luna whispers. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater. “Ginny.”

“Just do it—if you’re going to,” she says, voice hitching when Luna’s hands slide under her thighs and then around her ass and hips, squeezing. “ _Please_.”

She can’t seem to stop shaking. Overhead she can hear the nightbirds and the rustle of the branches in the wind where the mouth of the forest fans out into the river, feeling as much a part of the verdant earth as the tree roots or sediment in the rich Maritsa; gardens could bloom around them here, whole forests conjured from the magic of swallowing desire. The breath against her, blowing slowly across her wet skin makes the spreading ache almost throb, and she can feel her thighs shaking. Luna spreads her apart and licks at the folds beneath her clit until Ginny, babbling insanely, starts whispering _please please please_ , fingers shaking at the back of Luna’s head, her hair spread out on the grass like a crown of thorns. 

For a moment Luna stops, frozen between Ginny’s legs; then she strokes a finger against her and presses inside just up to the bend of her first knuckle, agonizingly slow, her tongue dragging out nonsense patterns against Ginny’s clit—alternately sucking, sweeping across her, searching. Eventually she flicks just the tip of her tongue over the straining swell of it, over and over, until she smooths it flat against her again and Ginny hisses like a match-flare. With a shaky hand she reaches down and circles her own fingers around where Luna’s is sliding rhythmically inside of her, feeling her openness at the join of their fingers, both their hands moving against each other. Tectonic shift, pattern and motion. She comes suddenly with one hand digging into the ground and the other buried in Luna’s hair, the razor’s-edge of the holy rush sparking wild through her body, centrifugal, pulsing out to her limbs; Luna’s fingers scratch red half-moon marks into her thighs as it shakes down deep in the wires of her body, gasping, and pulls Luna back up to her before she can even wipe her mouth. Ginny kisses her deeply, searchingly; it is what she’s wanted for nearly half her life. It is yearning and prayer and penance and defiance. It is the fragile hair’s-breadth difference between one thing and another. It is Luna’s mouth, and Luna's hands, and Luna's arms opening, over, and over, and over.

“I read an article once,” Luna is telling her, “about a woman who had regular orgasms when she brushed her teeth.”

“Muggle toothbrushes are wild,” says Ginny. There is dirt under her fingernails and her legs are entwined with Luna’s, warm and firm as a bolster. There are probably grass stains on her ass and she desperately wants a cigarette but she is, above all else, exultant.

“I mean _while_ she was brushing her teeth. Flossing, too. It was just like—this sensual experience for her, or else it was just she had an unusual fetish, or something. Out here,” says Luna, gesturing with the wide breadth of her palm, “it makes me feel like that, too.”

She can smell wet grass, the humid grey-green murmur of coming rain, and thinks she understands. Dental floss might’ve done it. “In seventh year I read a study a bunch of men did. About how women’s orgasms are a meaningless joke but men’s are vital to the order of the world or something, and we’re the only animals who even have them. Monolithic. Never read a bigger bunch of bullshit in my life.”

“That’s wrong, anyway. All female mammals have the same thing we do. Even female nargles have been observed having orgasms.”

“Seen it in action, have you.”

“Of course. They’re very vigorous, you know,” says Luna. The wind blows her hair against Ginny’s collarbone; for an instant she looks hesitant, a certain nervous quiver in her eyes and mouth. “What are, I mean. What happens now?”

The corners of her mouth lift slightly in a freeing lilt. “We go back in the morning and probably fuck over breakfast. Finish the job and go home. Become extremely acquainted with the couch at your place.”

“That sounds good.”

She means to say something else clever, but from here she can just make out the regal curve of the river where the kelpie lives like a ghost, alone with her agony and her rage and her brittle hope in a world that should have been hers but never was, who has managed, somehow, to cling to the tectonic fabric of the earth anyway, who has a name, who has bled and bled and been left with nothing. “I used to think that I was really bad at, I don’t know, living in the world. Like you’re trying to fit yourself into what you’re supposed to be, right, whatever other people have dug out for you, and I couldn’t do it. Sometimes I still wonder.”

“I don’t think life is about being something, really. What would that even mean when there’s so much we aren’t supposed to be and all these things we don’t know? I think it’s more about becoming, and for people like us it’s also about hammering on the bars until they break, because they’d never let you out if they had their way,” says Luna. “For instance. When you were twenty-six,” she says, running her knuckles along Ginny’s ribcage and making her shiver, “in your bathroom, in Dorset. When you were twenty-six you were in love with me.”

Ginny only stares for a moment before she says, “Yes. I was.”

In the distance she can hear thunder ripping out the smudged sky, the moon already hidden by low-hanging rainclouds rolling in on the gathering wind, as irresistible and utterly inescapable as Luna’s broadening smile that makes Ginny feel suddenly so very young, full of wrath and love, like she could peel the world and eat it raw. She stretches her body out and kisses the crown of Luna’s head; for a moment, she wants to cry, but for what she doesn’t even know. For herself, maybe, or for not knowing for so long, for sorrow and fear and all the things that are taken from you before you can even understand that you have them. Life is often a sad, perverse adventure that bursts open at the seams sometimes to give you everything you’ve ever wanted: her children, her flat in Manchester, Luna’s hand fluttering like a butterfly on her hip. There is darkness ahead and behind and there is, also, an unquenchable hope—a simple, ordinary thing too grand to confine to a single moment. Luna kisses her again, extraordinary and temporal: there is the promise of more, but Ginny knows also that it is singular in the texture of this moment. There will never be another like it.

“I’m glad,” she says into the tightness of the stretching seconds. “I was and it fucking hurt and I’m glad.”

When the rain tears out of the blurry sky they turn to greet it with open mouths and open hands, touching without speaking, and Ginny wishes, more than anything, for more.

—

She likes to walk home in the snow on nights when winter rolls in across the North Country outside her office window, tasting the cold mossy richness along the river and feeling the give of the snow beneath the new boots she’s trying to break in and making a few stops for the evening Muggle newspapers and fresh bread at the bakery a few blocks from home. When Lily and Albus are staying with her they have improvised games of snowball Quidditch in the courtyard where the spell-field outside the complex keeps them well-hidden from Muggle eyes and then plant themselves inside by the fire with cocoa or milky tea, composing letters to James at Hogwarts and watching television until they all fall asleep in a warm nest on the sofa, Ginny at one end and Luna at the other, all of them smelling like wet wool and dreamy winter midnight. It’s those moments that she has spent her life carrying around with her like a tableau: her children with red noses and eyes full of wonder, the way only children’s can be; sitting at the table in Devon with her brothers at their parents’ anniversary last year; ten years old in her mother’s garden, talking to the gnomes; Harry with his new dog, an enormous black hound whose eyes are flecked with grey; the first time she ever got on a broom and Fred had to come get her out of the oak in the backyard; her own face in the mirror, still herself despite everything else; Luna in their bedroom in the mornings, the sun lancing through the curtains and onto her face, filling in the crossword with wrong answers.

At times it feels like a certain leave-taking, as if she’s locking things away in the bottom of some mental trunk and knows she’ll never get them back again; as she gets older, she starts wishing that she could slow things down. But there is the promise of more—there is always more, and she watches the sun rise over the rooftops every morning, full of love and fury, cherishing the city and the day, becoming and becoming.

When she opens the door to the flat Luna is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of overly sweet coffee, reading the _Journal of Magical Women’s History_ , tapping a ballpoint pen against her nose and smiling brightly, Lily already in bed. Ginny kisses her and gets a cup of coffee. It’s strange sometimes, having someone to come home to and wait up for again and not feeling shattered and unraveled by it all. When she looks in the mirror she sees her broad shoulders and frizzy hair, her eyes that are her mother’s eyes, pebble-shrewd and undiminished, listening to the clamor of her own body.

“Anything good in there?” she asks Luna, peeling an orange with her fingers and dividing it into sections.

“A study about an all-women colony of mermaids in China who developed their own language,” Luna answers. “Anything good out there?”

“They’re giving me a job writing about the local kelpies again. Not for another week, but things ought to be thawed out a bit by then. Thought you might like to come along.”

“We could invite them here instead.”

“No good,” says Ginny, taking a dark mouthful of her orange. “I’m supposed to talk to them in their own territory. And they don’t like it here, remember? They didn’t want to come to our New Year’s party either.”

“I still like my idea.”

“You tend to have good ideas,” says Ginny. “Did you know most of the river goddesses throughout England were actually kelpies or mermaids? I’ve been doing lots of homework.”

“I had heard. You really should write a book one of these days.”

“Who’d publish it?”

“You have to put yourself out there, you know. It worked for me. And if not, then at least you wrote something worthwhile. There are things inside you,” says Luna, tilting her head sweetly, “that no one else can hear. I think it’s important to let them be heard. I think everyone should.”

“Did you read that in your journal, too?” Ginny asks, tasting the vanilla-smoky coffee under Luna’s tongue when she kisses her.

“No. That’s a Luna Lovegood original,” says Luna, laughing. “I’ll even let you use it for free.”

She goes to the window to watch the snow fall, waiting for Luna to come to her. When she does, Ginny presses her hip against Luna’s in the gauzy quiet that is like sleep and winds her arm around Luna’s waist so that her hand fans out against the small of her back, feeling the solid weight of her, breathing where Ginny breathes. “I’ve been thinking, she says. “If this—” she gestures: the room, the window, unsleeping Manchester, “if this is all we ever got, and the whole world ended right now, I’d be pretty happy.”

Luna kisses the side of her neck. “Me too,” she says, and they sway there together in the enormity of it until Ginny takes her hand and leads her back to the kitchen, feeling the motion of their footsteps guided by the compass of their hands, leading them anywhere. Then Ginny pours some whiskey and sits down with another hour before her, hers and hers alone.


End file.
